UCLouvain BELGIUM
Read More

Yaroslav Filinchuk studied Chemistry at Lviv National University (Ukraine) and received PhD in Inorganic Chemistry in 2002. He joined the University of Geneva (Switzerland) in 2000, where he begun to work on metal hydrides with Prof. Klaus Yvon. In 2006-2010 he worked at the Swiss-Norwegian Beam Lines at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (France). Since 2011 he is a professor of structural chemistry at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium). He received ESRF young scientist award in 2010 and published about 280 papers (h index 66 in Scopus, 75 in google scholar).

His research interests include chemistry of hydrogen-rich solids, in particular for hydrogen storage, solid-state electrolytes, porous materials, and various applications of crystallography in materials science. The main experimental techniques are in situ diffraction, as well as volumetric and thermal methods to characterize gas adsorption and stability of materials. In the recent years, his research has been expanding towards porous materials (MOFs, porous hydrides) and their interaction with various gas species.

UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND

Read More

Prof Megan O'Mara is a Professor at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at the University of Queensland.

Her research combines molecular simulation and biophysics to understand membrane proteins and drug interactions, advancing knowledge that supports the development of new therapeutics and improved human health.

UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

Read More

Professor Rachel Popelka-Filcoff is the Rock Art Australia Minderoo Chair in Archaeological Science in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne, where she leads the Archaeological Science Laboratory and several archaeological science initiatives. Her research develops novel multidisciplinary approaches to analyze cultural materials, artifacts and landscapes. These integrated methods offer an extraordinary view into past cultures, understanding of current society, and insight into our future. Rachel’s research group explores provenience, sourcing and exchange of geological materials and artifacts through analysis and modelling approaches, and the development of high-resolution, non-invasive characterization of cultural heritage materials, with a focus on pigments and rock art. Her research has been supported by multiple Australian Research Council grants and synchrotron/reactor proposals. Rachel holds a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Missouri (USA) as a National Science Foundation Research Fellow and completed a National Research Council postdoc at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, USA). From 2009-2020, she was at Flinders University in Adelaide, including 2010-2016 where she was an AINSE Senior Research Fellow.  She has presented her research in multiple keynotes and invited presentations and has had her research profiled in several scientific and general media outlets, radio and television interviews. Rachel is on the editorial board of the Journal of Archaeological Science and is a Fellow of the RACI (2019). 

PAUL SCHERRER INSTITUTE (PSI), SWITZERLAND

Read More

May Sharpe (née Marsh) received her bachelor degree in Biochemistry from the University of Sussex in 2004 and in 2008 she completed her PhD in Structural Biology at the University of Bristol. During her PhD she spent one year working at the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel. Together with Allan D’Arcy she developed the micro seed matrix screening technique for crystallisation optimisation. In 2008 she moved to the University of Cambridge to join the groups of Professor Sir Tom Blundell and Professor Marko Hyvonen’s working as part of an inter-departmental Wellcome Trust seeded drug discovery initiative to develop protein-protein interaction inhibitors using fragment-based approaches. In 2012 she joined the Macromolecular Crystallography (MX) in the Swiss Light Source (SLS) and since 2018 she has been working as the Group Leader of the MX Samples group, a section of the MX group responsible for protein crystal growth and delivery. Her group is responsible for the running of the PSI Crystallisation Facility and the SLS Fast Fragment and Compound Screening (FFCS) pipeline.

May’s scientific interests include protein crystallisation method development, particularly the use of seeding; fragment screening using X-ray crystallography, and the development of new methods for delivering crystallographic samples to the beam at synchrotron and XFEL beamlines.

STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY

Read More

TBC

GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY

Read More

TBC

Read More

Ian Madsen has in excess of 57 years' experience in X-ray analysis which includes XRF and both X-ray powder and single-crystal diffraction.

His research interests include:-

• Accuracy in powder diffraction, especially for applications using quantitative phase analysis (QPA).

• The optimisation of data-collection strategies for powder diffraction analysis, particularly whole-pattern, Rietveld-based methods.

• Science under extreme conditions. Ian has had a long involvement with studies which aim to measure the structural changes taking place under extreme conditions (temperature, pressure, pH etc..), especially those which emulate conditions found in mineralogical processing plants.

He is author or joint author of >100 research papers and 8 book chapters including Chapter 3.9 - Quantitative Phase Analysis in the International Tables for Crystallography, Volume H – Powder Diffraction.

Ian was a long-serving member of (i) AXAA’s National Council, including serving as its president, and (ii) the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) Commission on Powder Diffraction (CPD).

In February 2008, Ian was the inaugural recipient of the AXAA Bob Cheary Award for Excellence in Powder Diffraction. He was inducted as a Life Member of the AXAA in 2015.

Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation

Institute for Superconducting and Electronic Materials, the University of Wollongong

Read More

Prof Peterson obtained her PhD in 2004 from UTS and ANSTO’s neutron scattering group. She worked at the NIST Center for Neutron Research (USA) and USyd, before returning to ANSTO to commission two neutron diffractometers which she now co-operates. She holds a professorship with the University of Wollongong. Vanessa specialises in understanding materials function and has pioneered real-time characterization methods targeting materials involved in the storage and delivery of energy. Her published work has more than 14000 citations and her H-index is 64.

Vanessa is a lifetime member, elected Fellow, and past President of AXAA, a member of the Australian Academy of Science’s National Committee for Crystallography, a Titular Member of the Analytical Chemistry Division of the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry, and Chair of the International Union of Crystallography’s Commission on Neutron Scattering. She is also the Indian-Rim Region Co-regional Chair of the International Centre for Diffraction Data, and a Fellow of both the RSC and the RACI.

CSIRO

Read More

Dr Brianna Ganly is a transdisciplinary researcher leading the X-ray Science team in the Mineral Resources Research Unit. Brianna is also a member of the Autonomous Sensors Future Science Platform leadership team, managing a portfolio of nine projects as the Sensor Theme leader. Brianna holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Materials Science) and PhD (X-ray Physics) from the University of New South Wales, and draws upon this expertise to develop novel sensing technology across a wide range of industrial applications. The use of X-ray technology for mineral process control is a particular area of expertise for Brianna, however, in more recent roles she has expanded this expertise to include other sectors such as agriculture, environmental monitoring and biosecurity.

University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience

Read More

Dr. Rosemary Cater is a Senior Research Fellow and Group Leader at the University of Queensland’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience in Australia. She fulfilled her Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Renae Ryan at the University of Sydney, where she used electrophysiology and x-ray protein crystallography to understand how glutamate transporters serve a secondary function as chloride channels. She then went on to complete her post-doctoral training in the lab of Prof. Filippo Mancia at Columbia University, where she used single-particle cryo-electron microscopy and antigen-binding technology to determine structures of small membrane proteins. The overarching goal of the Cater Lab is to understand the molecular mechanisms of nutrient transport at the blood-brain barrier, and how variations to this are implicated in different diseases states.

Dr Cater is a current ARC DECRA Fellow, and has received several prestigious awards and fellowships, for her research including the New York Academy of Sciences Blavatnik Regional Award (2022) and the Eppendorf & Science Journal Award for Neurobiology (2024).

University of Technology Sydney

Read More

Dr Frederick Marlton is a Chancellor’s Research Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). After completing his Science and Engineering degrees from the Australian National University, he moved to Sydney to complete a PhD at the UNSW with Prof. John Daniels. He then conducted postdocs at Aarhus University with Dr Mads Jorgensen (MAX IV) and the University of Sydney with Profs Chris Ling and Brendan Kennedy. After a brief stint in consulting at Hypercube Scientific, optimising train networks for iron-ore mining, he started his fellowship at UTS in 2023. The focus of Fred’s research is structure property relationships in functional metal-oxide materials. Specifically, he specialises in understanding the local structure via neutron and X-ray pair distribution function (PDF) analysis. This has been applied to a variety of interesting materials, such as perovskite ferroelectrics, scheelite photocatalysts and pyrochlore ionic conductors. In 2024 he was a Fulbright scholar at Stanford University for 6 months, working with Prof. Hemamala Karunadasa on halide perovskites.

Department of Physics and Astronomy, Swinburne University of Technology

Read More

Associate Professor Nadia Zatsepin is an ARC Future Fellow in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Swinburne University of Technology. She is an internationally recognised expert in serial crystallography, developing methods for determining atomic-resolution biomolecular structures under near-physiological conditions. Her research spans X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs), synchrotron science, instrumentation, software development and experimental design, with applications in understanding the structure and dynamics of proteins and other macromolecules. Following a PhD at Monash University, she held research appointments at Arizona State University and La Trobe University before joining Swinburne. Her work has contributed to major advances in XFEL and synchrotron serial crystallography and their applications to structural biology.

NST-NMRTG and ANSTO, Australia

Read More

Dr. Thanh Ha Nguyen is a Materials Researcher at ANSTO with over 15 years of experience in crystallography, X-ray diffraction (XRD), and materials characterization. She received her PhD from the University of Sydney in 2008 and completed postdoctoral research at HKUST (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) before joining Bruker AXS as a Single Crystal X-ray Diffraction Application Scientist in Singapore. Her expertise includes XRD, SC-XRD and crystal structure determination. More recently, her work has focused on applying PONKCS-based diffraction methods to quantify glass composition and amorphous content in nuclear wasteforms, supporting the development and evaluation of durable waste immobilization technologies.

Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research

Read More

Dr. Sylvie Callegari is a recently appointed lab head at WEHI, studying the role of ubiquitin in mitochondrial quality control. Dr Callegari completed her PhD at the University of South Australia before moving to Göttingen, Germany for a postdoctoral position in mitochondrial biochemistry in the lab of Prof. Peter Rehling, where she focussed on mitochondrial quality control and protein import into mitochondria. In 2019, she joined Prof. David Komander's lab (WEHI) as a Senior Research Officer, where she led the team that uncovered the structure and activation mechanism of the Parkinson’s disease-linked protein PINK1 that acts as a beacon for mitochondrial damage (Callegari et al. Science 2025), for which the team were awarded the 2025 Eureka Prize for Scientific Discovery.

Flinders University

Read More

Matthew J. Evans obtained his PhD in 2022 under the helm of Prof. Martyn Coles and Dr Mathew Anker. He subsequently joined the research group of Prof. Cameron Jones where he worked as Postdoctoral Research Associate until January 2026. Matthew is now an ARC DECRA Fellow at Flinders University, where his research focusses on the rich and expansive chemistry of environmentally benign main-group elements.